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Covid-19 has changed everything. This public health crisis has created a barrage of significant and often difficult-to-address challenges that individuals and organizations have never faced before. The global pandemic altered demand for products and services in every industry sector. In the process, it has exposed weaknesses in global supply chains and service networks.
We’re all living through this together, and I'm sure we can all agree it hasn’t been easy. At the same time, the adjustments and changes each of us has had to make in light of the pandemic have shown that what may have previously seemed impossible is now possible.
For businesses, these adjustments have come in the form of rapidly adopting technologies to enable digital transformation. Embracing automation is one way that businesses can address the current environment and prepare for the future.
A May report from Forrester found that automation may be the key for many businesses to survive the recession. Leslie Joseph, the lead analyst who authored the report, wrote that “Covid-19 just made automation a boardroom imperative.”
End-to-end automation enables organizational resilience, which is now table stakes. In leading a global AI and robotics organization, I’ve seen firsthand how businesses that take a companywide approach to resiliency are well positioned to see the biggest competitive advantage.
The mortgage industry serves as a cautionary tale of missed opportunity.
Many companies have automated processes to maintain operations and the delivery of services, and to overcome staff shortages, during the pandemic. And those businesses that have not yet embarked on automation journeys probably wish they had.
Just look at what happened with U.S. mortgages and the mortgage processing industry.
Interest rates dropped to record lows while unemployment rates reached a record high. This created the perfect storm for borrowers to refinance or ask for forbearance on current loans. For mortgage processing companies, this could have represented significant new business.
But most mortgage companies were staff-strapped and unable to mobilize their workforces to act on this flood of requests. The mortgage industry is a paper-intense sector with many repeatable processes that are ripe for automation. Yet most mortgage processing firms are late adopters when it comes to automation technology.
Before the pandemic, we were engaged in digital transformations with some businesses that, unfortunately, didn’t act quickly enough. Some of these companies have recently come back to tell us that they regret not automating some of the most essential processes sooner.
Businesses that handle lots of paper and unstructured data can benefit from automation.
Rather than turning away business, outsourcing it or relying solely on human labor, companies should consider using automation to expand capacity. At the same time, they can improve resiliency and reduce risk due to the remote access capabilities that accompany digital transformation. Any paper-intensive organization that handles lots of unstructured data is ripe for automation.
Organizations in banking and financial services, BPO providers, education, energy and utilities, food and beverage, government, healthcare and pharmaceutical, insurance, manufacturing, professional services, real estate, retail, telecom, transportation and logistics, travel, and hospitality all fall under this umbrella.
To benefit from automation, you first need to access all types of data.
We all know that the secret to growing your business is building scalable, end-to-end processes. Those efforts become hamstrung when there is a lack of technology integration.
Most enterprises now recognize that they might need to go beyond building bots and traditional robotic process automation (RPA) task automation to enable true digital transformation and achieve the scalability they crave to be resilient in our quickly changing world.
The challenge is not understanding the gap between task-based and total automation. It’s digitizing the data that allows the full end-to-end process automation to occur. To digitize data, first you need to access it. This means reading, understanding and curating it to become usable further down the process stream. That’s what enterprises are struggling with today because optical character recognition (OCR) technology often can’t solve the data access problem.
RPA often employs OCR to capture data from documents. But OCR uses template-dependent data extraction, so it can only capture data from structured documents. Yet 80% of data within most organizations is unstructured. To handle this unstructured data, organizations might consider more adapted solutions like cognitive machine reading (CMR), which uses the power of artificial intelligence to read all types of data.
Organizations that leverage CMR can recognize, classify and extract data from all kinds of documents. With intelligent automation supported by CMR, businesses can improve their operational processes and ensure business continuity, allowing faster turnaround times and greater accuracy.
What holds enterprises back from embracing a digital future?
Even if you have the right tools in place, there are still stark realities preventing businesses from beginning their digital transformation efforts. This includes the prospect of navigating oceans of data, reinventing outdated processes and dealing with legacy systems of record.
Enterprises have a lot of data in multiple formats. Manually extracting data from these documents requires a huge effort that’s compounded by the errors associated with manual entry.
Digital transformation also requires organizations to dedicate time and resources to evaluate outdated processes and identify the processes that are most suitable for automation. Meanwhile, complex IT environments make it difficult to leverage data. Maintaining aging systems uses a large portion of an IT budget, yet businesses may be reluctant to make wholesale changes.
For business resiliency, follow these basic best practices for implementing automation.
For any business leader wondering how and where to begin implementing automation for digital transformation, I'd suggest the following:
• Commit wholeheartedly. Digital transformation is not a project. It’s not low-hanging fruit — it’s a journey to continuous improvement.
• Draw out a road map. If needed, you can make adjustments along the way.
• Establish the right governance, resources and teams. Make sure they are supported by appropriate budgets.
• Set realistic targets and goals. When you reach them, you can use them as proof points to build on that success.
Finally, make it happen — don’t overthink it. Get moving because the time is now.
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